drs23
Veteran
ARIAN FOSTER DOESN'T hate your fantasy football team. He won't hate you if you draft him or even if you bet against him, and if you ask him about this "fantasy stuff," as he calls it, he will tell you that even though he makes fun of it -- fantasy football, after all, is fantasy -- he's actually kind of indifferent about the whole thing. "Either you play or you don't; it doesn't bother me either way," he says. "But people think it does." And that bothers him. "People take it so seriously, but it's not even a tangible thing! It's all just silly, man. Fantasy football isn't real."
Foster, whose first name comes from Aquarian, the astrological water bearer whose moniker means "the holder of knowledge," is extremely real. And he makes a point of it, this realness, he wants you to know. Desperately. He is 25 years old -- a fantastically fortunate and rich 25-year-old, granted, one whose prodigious talents as a running back just netted him a five-year, $43.5 million contract (he'll see about $18 million this year) with the Houston Texans. But he's also just three years out of college, still a kid who favors the standard young-male-athlete uniform of T-shirt and baggy shorts unless he absolutely has to wear actual clothes, and he's still just trying to do what's expected of him while striving to keep his dignity and individuality intact. "I don't mind being entertainment," he says. "What bothers me is when people dehumanize their entertainers. And that's what people don't get."
A pretty long read but the rest is here.